Controlling the reactive caching of wildcard rules for packet processing, such as flow processing in software-defined networks
US10129181B2 · kind B2 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Aug 16, 2014 |
| Grant date | Nov 13, 2018 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | May 20, 2036 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
- CPC primaryH04L49/25
- WIPO fieldDigital communication
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
Software-Defined Networking (“SDN”) enables flexible flow control by caching policy rules at OpenFlow switches. Compared with exact-match rule caching, wildcard rule caching can better preserve the flow table space at switches. However, one of the challenges for wildcard rule caching is the dependency between rules, which is generated by caching wildcard rules overlapped in field space with different priorities. Failure to handle the rule dependency may lead to wrong matching decisions for newly arrived flows, or may introduce high storage overhead in flow table memory. A wildcard rule caching system, which may be used for SDN partitions the field space into logical structures called buckets, and caches buckets along with all the associated wildcard rules. Doing so resolves rule dependency while using control network bandwidth efficiently. Further, controller processing load and flow setup latency are reduced.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.